Last week Brilliance Remastered convened the second session of Maroon Studies. This session called “Necessary as Water” after Audre Lorde’s poem “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge,” explored our contemporary challenges with relating across difference informed by transnational feminist critiques of knowledge production and black geographical frames. We engaged work by Audre Lorde, Jacqui Alexander, Chandra Mohanty, Katherine McKittrick and Michelle Wright and shared generously and bravely from our own experiences.

On of the poems we created together is called “Prepositions.” We started by describing what we were relating “across” in our community accountable intellectual and activist work and then we started to imagine additional relationships through alternate prepositions. We found that holding one preposition “across” was difficult. It felt stiff in our bodies. We noticed that different prepositions rang differently with different nouns. We created space for more clarity and questions about the nuances of our politics in relation, of relation, as relation. We ultimately created an archive that we hope you will participate in. Check it out!

Prepositions (On Our Relationships to Difference) by the participants in Maroon Studies Session #2: Necessary as Water

1. across what?

across time zones

across the digisphere

across partitions

across galaxies

across borders

across harm

across generations

across dispensations

across sounds

across town

across trades and talents

across life and death

across nations

across experiences

across what’s been forgotten

across what can’t be separated

across salt

across species

across the table

across her face

across the way

across the lake

across our adornments

across our bodies

across home

across poems

across circles

across domesticity

across children’s bodies

across our ancestors

across spirit

across forgiveness

2. or… (other prepositional possibilities)

between

around

underneath

beside

with

against

about

in

inside of

of

under

behind

from

for

past

by

through

3.(relate)

this is your opportunity to use the archive above to make your own poems

how does it feel if you replace “across” in poem one with another preposition from poem two? Everytime? One time? What prepositions and nouns resonate with your experiences of working across/through difference?

Eg.

through our ancestors

around our children

beside harm

of forgiveness…

Feel free to share your poems in the comment section!

Also if you would like to participate in the August Intensive of Maroon Studies you can sign up right here:

Intensive #3: Blood, Water and Land August 10-12, 2015(12pm to 2pm Eastern)

This webinar is for ride or die radicals who live to love the people. Drawing on the legacy of Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa, the solidarity journalism of Alexis DeVeaux, the blood ecologies of Jewelle Gomez and Audre Lorde and the salience of spit, saltwater and sangre, we will explore connections, contradictions and discursive possibilities across imperial divisions towards tangible outcomes.